Tuesday Intro: The Things We Learn When We’re Dead by Charlie Laidlaw

For the first time in a while, I’m linking up again with Vicky at I’d Rather Be At The Beach who hosts a post every Tuesday for people to share the first chapter/paragraph of the book they are reading, or thinking of reading soon.

This week it’s The Things We Learn When We’re Dead by Charlie Laidlaw, who very kindly sent me a copy to read. I have to say the cover was what first caught my eye, but it sounds good too. Here’s what it’s about…

On the way home from a dinner party, Lorna Love steps into the path of an oncoming car. When she wakes up she is in what appears to be a hospital – but a hospital in which her nurse looks like a young Sean Connery, she is served wine for supper, and everyone avoids her questions. It soon transpires that she is in Heaven, or on HVN. Because HVN is a lost, dysfunctional spaceship, and God the aging hippy captain. She seems to be there by accident… Or does God have a higher purpose after all?

At first Lorna can remember nothing. As her memories return – some good, some bad – she realises that she has decision to make and that maybe she needs to find a way home.

And here’s how it starts…

“At the end of her Edinburgh Street, where it joined a busier road, was a security camera perched high on a metal pole. If anyone had been watching they would have seen a slim young woman in a red dress illuminated under a streetlight. They would have seen that she seemed agitated, her feet fluttering on the pavement’s edge, her hands raised to her face, turning this way and that, and then stepping into the road. She seemed to be crying, unsure what she was doing. They would have seen the approaching car and that the young woman was looking in the wrong direction. When she did hear it, turning in mesmerised surprise, it was too late. But perhaps nobody had been watching the CCTV screen because it was the driver of the car who called for the ambulance as a small crowd gathered, and who then tried to make the young woman comfortable – talking to her, even pushing his jacket under her head – and waited beside her until the ambulance arrived and the paramedic said he couldn’t detect a pulse.”

What do you think? It’s a long paragraph but quite interesting I thought. Would you keep on reading?